Clay
Affiliation Founder and leader of Team 6, "Landmar League", current members: 1 Abilities Creation Magic '''- Able to produce up to a max of about five pounds of any given material over a 24 hour period, power "refills" partially whenever he eats, after a half hour to hour delay. Able to modify up to a max of about ten pounds of any given material over a 24 hour period in pretty much any way he sees fit and understands well enough to accomplish. Can't split or fuse atoms or anything like that. '''Geokinetic Invisibility - Clay can melt into the earth, becoming indistinguishable from the ground and smooth out any distinguishing shapes, or just hide as a ground-looking thing whenever he is "in" the ground, meaning skin contact and at least a finger or toe dug into a little hole or something. "Ground" means that it must be mainly dirt-based, stone-based isn't any good to him, and that it must not be suspended in midair or anything like that, although there can be layers of other things between the dirt and the earth, e.g. he could hide in the pot of a large plant theoretically. Cement is very rock-like but formed largely of sand, so he can manage a sort of natural camoflauge and difficulty to spot even when looking for when inside cement buildings or on top of large cement plazas. He must still breathe during this process, and though no visible movement or even a breathing orifice will be in any way apparent, the air will still move and body heat will still radiate off of him as normal. If he sinks in all the way, he will suffocate unless he comes back up for air. If he moves around quickly while mostly above ground and invisible, the magic won't be able to compensate and people will be able to notice what looks like the earth heaving or something burrowing along inside of it. Slow, careful, deliberate movements remain entirely invisible/unnoticeable. Clayish Pseudoskin - Living, touch-sensitive, clay-like bodysuit. Slight damage reduction, no other effects. Does not bleed or cause significant pain when damaged. Category:Team 6Backstory Childhood Clay (real name unknown) is the only son of an alcoholic and an aging stripper. While he may have been smacked around or ignored a bit here and there, and nagged or yelled at a fair share, his early life was really not nearly as bad as one might imagine. Mostly, it was just dull. He spent the primary school years developing a fascination with books, trying to get the right sneakers to fit in with the cool kids, and fantasizing about getting a kiss from his homeroom teacher. Middle school was much the same, with the difference that his substitute teachers and classmates were his crushes, he was old enough to realize no one at school liked or cared about him, he began to withdraw from his limited social life, and it was uncanny how often he would find a candy bar in his pocket that he didn't remember putting there. He began to grow very pudgy and misanthropic...it was during this period that the seeds of psychosis began to flourish, and from this point on he has always struggled with lethargy, anger, tantalizing fantasies of killing people he knows, and persistent, draining considerations of suicide. Adolescence Adolescence was especially awkward for Clay in light of his mother's profession and the fact that, although he had spent enough time on the internet to be uncannily well versed in sexual practices ranging from the commonplace to the disturbed, he was physically a "late bloomer". It was uncanny how often he would seem to find snacks he was sure he could remember already having eaten...never enough to share, but who would he share with anyways? He marshaled his courage once in sophomore year and once as a senior to ask a few girls out, but the rejection and subsequent jeering and unwanted attention at last put those ideas out of his mind for good. Adulthood (pre-Neon City) Clay muddled his painful, awkward way through the first year of an electrical engineering degree and spent the summer in an abandoned apartment building living on snack food and the crack fumes from the junkies downstairs. He would lie around reading books and hallucinating in a state of severe dehydration for days on end, and eventually wake up and remember to take a sip of water. It was at the end of the summer, as he prepared to get clean and return to college, that Clay realized he was still eating from the same bag of snacks and drinking from the original gallon of water. After getting cleaner and concluding he was not just hallucinating, he came to grips with his powers of PURE FUCKING MAGIC. He cloned the bills in his wallet first, buying himself a real apartment and paying off his bills/for his next semester and expenses, carefully laundering his money in a variety of geographically disparate places in order to get bills with new IDs to clone and avoid suspicion. His first weekend at college he torrented a relevant cosmetic surgery guidebook and slowly, painfully, and painstakingly molded himself a new face in a bathroom stall with only a hand mirror and a sketched references. He proceeded to sell lots of pre-cloned drugs to college kids and hit on attractive women only to be told again and again to fuck off and eat a salad. Sunday night he changed back his face and returned to his dorm, and Monday he stopped creating snacks and started changing excess adipose tissue into saline to drain through small subdermal incisions. Hyperfocusing on the natural sciences, he passed his chemistry and physics electives but two of architecture classes, disinterested as his powers were too limited to build structures of scale. He dropped out of school and adopted a fake career as a "freelance writer", getting what he needed through his combined powers of matter manipulation and cunning. Once he got thin and well-muscled enough via medical study and matter manipulation, he made for himself a "player" face (reverting back whenever necessary by dint of a photograph of each state of his face stored in his wallet) and went on a sex binge, having "enhanced" himself by now in a few other ways, and for a time did nothing but fuck and take a variety of amphetamines. Even in a state of total hedonism, Clay never grew careless enough to cause any suspicion, and his reclusive daily life was a good cover for his night life. At length he grew bored and dissatisfied with his meaningless existence, and, leaving the day before Christmas (ignoring his mother's calls and half-hearted voicemails asking about his holiday plans), he arrived in Neon City on New Years' Day, 2014 wearing his player face, tried to kiss a normal-looking girl at midnight and got his arm flash-frozen up to the elbow. Neon City Clay lay in a musty hospital bed, slipping between delirium and unconsciousness for a full two weeks while a second-rate hack of a gene doctor totally botched his new/reconstructed arm. After an initial freakout, he cheerfully thanked the doctor and got him his money too promptly for even the first threat of kneecap breakage to be given. The US dollar, it seemed, was still an equally powerful force amongst all of these demi-gods and freaks of nature, and Clay had soon gotten himself nicely set up in the relatively safe and peaceful suburbs. He delved deeply into manuals of anatomy and surgery and soon fixed his arm up quite well. He was back to a NEET life, venturing outdoors only to track down copies of particularly shady "medical" documents original to Neon City, and after a while, he opened a third hole in his skull, warped his forehead out so as not to crush his brain, and by a combination of careful, meticulous matter creation and mundane surgical practice, installed himself a third eye and eventually a second ocular portion jutting off of his left prefrontal lobe, and after a while managed to accustom himself to focusing all three in harmony, enhancing his three-dimensional awareness. He experimented with more eyes on the side of his head, but just three was exhausting enough, and his mind would outright reject side eyes due to the incoherency of the overall visual picture caused by the large gap between eyes. Muh Dick Falling into another bout of sexual monomania, but still fearing to try his luck with any of the mutants around him, Clay made for himself an impractically large penis, but subsequently reduced it somewhat as it was getting in his way too much. It was during this period, alone in his basement, making micromanagement changes to his dick for days on end and sleeping only at the point of utter exhaustion, that Clay developed his unique psychological tic...a Tourettes-like compulsion to talk about how big his dick is, how he can use his powers to make it even bigger, and how all of the women around him should have sex with him...whenever someone talks about dicks, sex, or just at random. This has gotten completely beyond his ability to control. Metabolic Fuckery During this lowest ebb of his mental faculties, Clay came suddenly back to life with a daring, genius, and completely insane idea. Since it had become evident that his powers were limited by his metabolism, he began to undermine the very fundamentals of his biology, maladjusting each of the organs of each of his organ systems in tiny, justifiably paranoid tweaks as he attempted to overclock his metabolism far beyond the natural range of humanity. He was eventually successful, but still deals with the side effects of his tampering, occasionally being obligated to create stem cells and feed them into one organ or the other for lack of understanding or ability regarding how to fix the underlying problems. Still, he is now capable of processing up to around twenty pounds of food per day, if necessary, and can process small individual meals of a pound or two completely for their total ATP within about a half hour. Through more mad scientist bullshit, taking lots of amphetamines, and shopping from the bargain bins of illicit "Xenon Surplus" venues, Clay somehow managed to invoke some metaphysical ritual or other with the result that he can now melt into the ground. He also developed, as a combination of some sketchy medical procedures and his own modifications, a thick outer superlayer of "skin" which has some sensory feedback and through which he can sweat, but which functions as clothing and seems, well, clayish in nature. It was his way of remaking himself clean, casting out his stale human vanity (long worn thin by his sheer ability to indulge it however he liked) in favor of increased efficacy. He still kept the big dick, though, even though it creates an obvious, out of place hanging bulge in the "suit". Ghetto Being raised in a fairly ghetto area, Clay felt uncomfortable living in a suburban basement with no sirens to put him to sleep at night. Furthermore, he wanted to try out his new knowledge and abilities against the big bad Neon City, so he moved into a complete shithole in the middle of a large super-slum and managed to cripple or scare the shit out of the mostly low-tier mutants who came to rob/sodomize him to the point that half of the tenants bailed on the small apartment building he was living in, and the owner never ventures to the slum to check on things so long as Clay keeps sending the counterfeited bills, which he started doing for the whole building, so now he's sort of in charge, the sultan and protector of Block 27-CF, Building E in Old West Neo-Landmar, Neon City. He's sealed off about a third of the empty rooms (I mean really sealed, melded together the cracks) for his own personal use, holding the madcap productions of his now-less-limited abilities and deranged personality. He once tried to make a woman in one of them, but couldn't get everything to stay alive long enough to complete the body. In others he has whole model cities, complicated wind-up toys, etc Heroes Aren't Born Despite extreme cultural apathy, Clay found himself in the curious position of a pariah who is suddenly feared, respected, even admired by people. He was the big boss of Building E. He started to be more...social? Sex, trading in stale counterfeit for new, real bills, for different serials to copy. He was having actual conversations, mostly to instruct or enlighten others, but still. He found out about the story of Manmar from the various ghetto rats who were in and out to trade in drugs or have amusing scuffles involving their minor, partly-developed abilities (when present at all). The name stuck for some reason, and the story with it. He knew nothing of the man, not his appearance, not even the abilities he had possessed and brought to bear, but the sheer grit, the giving no quarter, defending even an already-burning building, mutually assured destruction to smite his would-be killer. He would be the silent watcher, the judge, jury and executioner, the saviour from the depths of the earth itself. Who would care for Landmar now that its martyr was martyred? Who would keep the madness at bay, walking the fine line to whatever nebulous end the tightrope led? Clay would. He would fight and he would survive. It was a transformational decision, but really only natural. For the first time in his life, he had people depending on him, something that needed him, and something to protect. Maybe, just maybe, he would try another first: not standing alone. Evildoers beware. Category:Team 6